The Long, Wet Summer of 1942: the Ontario Farm Service Force, Small-Town Ontario and the Nisei‪.‬

ABSTRACT/RESUME This paper explores how the notion of the "other" is constructed during wartime by analyzing the dispersal of Canada's west coast Japanese-Canadian population to points further east, and their employment with the Ontario Farm Service Force as farm labourers in several southwestern Ontario towns and villages in 1942. The core of the Japanese-Canadian experience rests in their shameful treatment during WWII at the hands of a government that was supposedly committed to the ideals of democracy. While studies focusing on the internment are numerous, there has been little research about the Japanese Canadians who relocated to other parts of Canada. Additionally, most of the scholarly and non-scholarly information has centred on the internment as a west coast phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new chapter into the wartime internment and dispersal of thousands of Japanese Canadians by examining the role of the Ontario Farm Service Force in the employment of male, Japanese-Canadian labour in the wartime sugar beet economy in southwestern Ontario, and the impact that this infusion of "aliens" had on small-town Ontario populations.